Hardwood Paroxysm Presents: The NBA Season’s Most Anticipated Games

I’m looking forward to Cavaliers vs. Timberwolves on Saturday, January 31
By Steve McPherson (@steventurous) 

There’s an unmistakable folly to looking ahead, whether it’s a team looking past their next opponent  or anyone who was REALLY looking forward to The Phantom Menace in 1999. Anticipation sows the seeds for disappointment. Especially now, in an era when copious advance information about nearly anything is readily available in the form of previews, trailers, preseason power rankings, demos, betas, Tinder profiles and on and on. I mean even this entire post is basically teeing these matchups up for failure.

In truth, the season’s most fun games are the ones you never see coming: the double-OT thrillers, the 50+-point games by the likes of Tony Delk and Corey Brewer, the nights when a player like J.J. Barea gets riled up at Ray Allen and disparagingly compares him to a diminutive cat.

So-called revenge games or homecoming games for traded players rarely live up to the hype. After Kevin Garnett was traded to Boston, he didn’t even play in his first game back at the Target Center in a Celtics uniform. Who knows what will have happened by the time the Cleveland Cavaliers and Kevin Love arrive in Minnesota on January 31? They will, in fact, have already faced the Cavs once on December 23. But combine a Saturday night game with what would have already been a huge draw just for LeBron with Love’s first game back and you have all the makings of something that might excite or might disappoint, but will in no way escape being A THING in the manner of high school reunions or going to a concert you know your ex will be at or meeting your girlfriend’s parents. That weighty thingness is going to draw all things to it and the days leading up to it are going to be excruciating. The palpable hum in the Target Center is going to be something else. The presumed roar of disapproval when Love is introduced for the Cavs and every time he touches the ball will be cathartic for the fanbase, no matter how ill-placed their reprobation.

 This is Minnesota, so eventually that wound will close — or at the very least we’re going to stop talking about it. If Love goes on to win a championship with the Cavs, many Wolves fans will appreciate it, will likely even be cheering along the way with Cleveland. But for that one night, every difficult thing gets to be concentrated down into the simple act of emptying your lungs at someone you think did you wrong. Life rarely afford us that kind of opportunity: to yell in the face of frustration with little consequence. Sports gives it to us all the time.